Family Business

It's been a long time since I've posted... I've been extraordinarily busy with my day job and the voiceover sessions at night. Went to Vegas with my husband at the first of August for a business event of his. It was okay - nothing to write home about.

Today is my brother's 49th birthday. I have no idea what to get for him -- what do you get the guy that has nothing? He lives very simply (not by choice -- more by necessity). Maybe I'll get him a gift certificate to Trader Joe's. He can always use food.

The thing that's turned my world upside down, though, is Mom. She 's having some awful health issues, and I'm worried sick. About 15 years ago, she had a second hip replacement surgery on her right side. They put in a Titanium and Teflon ball joint attached to the long bone in her leg. It was a Godsend at the time and fixed what was a very painful issue.

Since then, she was diagnosed with AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration - http://www.amd.org/). She went through several years of painful surgeries and needle-related treatments on the affected eye, but in the end, she completely lost her left eye to the disease.

Well, on August 8th, two things happened: The first was that her Titanium hip joint broke through the pelvic socket bone. They had not replaced that and she had been walking and shoveling the driveway and gardening on that hip for the past 15 years, and all the while, the metal ball joint was wearing away at the socket. She has an unbelievably high threshold of pain, and she occasionally complained about soreness, but the doctors said that it had to have been agonizing for at least the past five years.

The second thing that happened was a result of the first... The pain from that event caused a major spike in her blood pressure, which in turn caused a blood vessel to burst behind the retina of her remaining eye. She woke up the next morning unable to walk, and unable to see.

Her eye had filled with blood, and she said all she could see was a bright red cloud. It has since turned into a large black cloud that covers the central part of her vision. All she can see is some slivers of color and movement on the outside corners of her eye. Her eye doctor said it's AMD, and there is some hope because they have developed new treatments that didn't exist several years ago when they were treating the first eye.

However, she has to go in and have the pelvic socket fixed. The doctors have manufactured a replacement hip socket and will have to cut away about a third of her pelvis and replace it with this prosthetic joint, using a cement made from bone powder to attach it to the remaining bone.

This surgery was scheduled for August 31st, but her eye doctor said that cannot happen. She would be receiving blood thinners during and after the surgery to help avoid clots, but those same blood thinners could completely destroy the already weakened blood vessels in her eye. So they want to do a new laser therapy treatment on her eye FIRST, before she goes in for the hip surgery.

In the meantime, she is battling deep depression, serious pain, and fear. She has been living on her own since my father passed away, and I think that it's been her ability to be independent that has kept her lively and happy. If she loses both her eyesight and her ability to walk at the same time, I don't think she'll be able to make it very far after that. She's been putting on a brave face, but I can hear the strain in her voice.

So I leave this Saturday to go be with her. I don't know how long I will be there, but I will stay with her as long as it takes. My husband will be remaining in LA to keep the home fires burning, and I have arranged with my day job to be able to access the computer system and other business tools in case I need to stay with Mom for several months.

What this will do to my voiceover career, I have no idea. But that isn't a concern right now. Right now, all I care about is Mom.

Out of the frying pan...

... into the Casting Office

So I'm doing it. I'm going to auditions and submitting things through Actors Access. I'm networking and going to organized schmooze events and all of that. I'm committed. I attend workshops and table reads to help me learn more about acting techniques. I pore over countless scripts and books of monologues and poetry, absorb Chekhov and Strindberg, practice regional dialects in the car on my way to and from my Blasted Day Job. Yesterday I auditioned for a role in a play that required an RP English accent.

And it felt good.

But I don't want to be one of 'those' actors that simply sends out the obligatory headshot & resume mailings into the Casting Director ether. I'd much rather make friends with various casting professionals and learn something useful from them about what they do and their processes. I've worked in the film industry for 16 years -- behind the scenes -- from a Production Manager to a PA and just about everything in between but I never got any exposure to the casting people. They were always in an undisclosed office space that was listed on the call sheet but nobody ever went there. I assume the writer's offices were next door, because nobody ever saw them, either.

I'm fascinated by how CD's come up with some of their more creative casting choices. I always wonder how they manage to find those unexpected nuggets of gold in a character actor that nobody's ever seen before (go see "The Terminal" -- the character of "Gupta Rajan" played by a little-known 84-year-old actor from India named Kumar Pallana is one of those rare nuggets); Or how they just KNOW to cast someone that seems at first glance to be completely out of place in a role that ends up glowing because the actor added something indefinable to the role that no other actor would have thought of. How do they do that? How do they know? Is it instinct, research... or just luck?

And as a long-time community theater actor, I am discovering for the first time about the Hollywood "system." I'm learning about the do's and don'ts of submitting, about the scams that get an actor to pay a $10 'class fee' to meet a casting professional... I'm trying to find a good showcase workshop in an ocean full of mediocre or truly bad ones, and trying to meet people in this unfamiliar end of the Hollywood community.

There are a lot of closed doors, and I don't want to become one of 'those' actors that over-mail, or become such a pain in the butt that nobody wants to hire them. But then again, I don't want to be so polite as to fall under the casting radar. My husband says I'm not pushy enough, but there has to be a way to get into the loop without losing my inherent sense of common courtesy and decorum.

If it were easy... I know, I know.

This morning I contacted AFTRA. I want to be listed in the Academy Players Directory, but an actor has to be union to get in there. I thought (apparently erroneously) that SAG and AFTRA were one and the same. The rules, no more "vouchers" (now it's a "point system") and the whole gauntlet that an actor has to run through in order to achieve SAG status confused me. "They" say you have to be a union actor. "They" don't tell you that it takes an act of God to get there. It's harder than ever. However, AFTRA has a different set of rules and entry requirements. But so far, I haven't been able to find anyone that really can tell me what's going on. I think everyone's confused.

"They" also say you need an agent. Okay, how does THAT work? Another obligatory mass-mailing of photos and resumes? And it's not as if agents don't already get several hundred of those a week. How does an actor keep from simply getting lost in the piles? How do you know an agent's a good one or a bad one? What kind of agent should I get? Should I have more than one? WHY do you need an agent?

I've been reading "Casting Q's" by Bonnie Gillespie, and I am learning about the various CD's likes and dislikes, but mostly I am learning that every casting person is very different. There is no one right or wrong way. What's right to one might completely put another off.

It's all quite overwhelming. But I am not one to give up because something is difficult. I really WANT this. I'm not looking to get famous. I simply want to be able to act full-time.

Life is far too short to work at something you can only tolerate.

TV Pilot Season

Found a new photographer!


We have a headshot winner. Three, actually, as one will be my main headshot, and I've had two different postcards created for other mailings, like thank-you notes and announcements that I've been cast in something.

Speaking of, I actually have a 'table read' for a TV pilot! Tonight! A couple of the writers from the writer's workshop (see previous entries) have merged talents and created a sit-com pilot. I have read the script and I think it's worthy of Network consideration. Not only because it's really good, but also to do SOMETHING to combat the "Reality TV" trend. I am SO sick of that crap.

Here's a question... is it really possible that Americans in general are SO obtuse that they cannot see the correlation between watching a television show that hog-ties "contestants" and forces them to eat sheep's eyeballs and roaches until they vomit and the whole Iraqi-prisoner torture scandal?

I mean, where do you THINK those soldiers got the idea to do those inhumane things in the first place? Over here in the States, we call it "Prime Time Entertainment." Yee-ha!

Don't get me started.
(Check out this appropriate webshop)

In the meantime, I'm still slogging along at the BDJ (Blasted Day Job). It's not a bad company, but I am discovering many trials and tribulations with working for a humongous corporation. The hierarchy is so convoluted that it's difficult to figure out whose job is what, and I constantly have to wait for one department or another to get their poop in a group before I can tackle a task of my own. Although in comparison to the Icky job (see menu above for that entry), I suppose I should be happy I'm here and not there. The people I deal with every day are pleasant and okay to work with. Nobody's screaming at each other, and it's nice to have a support system that helps when I get buried.

But today, I'm thinking about this pilot. There will be a full cast of nine or so actors, including me, and the two writers. It's the first read, and I'm looking forward to working with the other actors and learning about creating chemistry and relationships. The writers have told me that my character was actually written FOR me, which is not only terribly flattering, but it's also very validating. I AM a good actor, and there is no reason whatsoever for me not to be working as one full time.

So there.